Nidal Malik Hasan, the former Army major who gunned down 13 people during the 2009 terror attack at Fort Hood, Texas, will face death by firing squad, the Pentagon announced Monday.
Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell made the announcement on X, writing that “Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has recommended — and President Donald J. Trump has approved — death by U.S. Army firing squad for convicted terrorist Nidal Malik Hasan, the jihadist who opened fire on unarmed American soldiers at Fort Hood in 2009.”
“The Secretary of the Army will set the time and place of the execution,” Parnell added. “Judgement day for Hasan has finally come.”
The decision marks a historic moment for the U.S. military, which has not carried out an execution since 1961 and has not used a firing squad to put a service member to death since World War II.
The announcement of the president’s approval came just days after Tennessee’s failed attempt to execute Christa Pike by lethal injection. That botched execution prompted the state’s governor to halt any further executions this year and order a third-party review.
Asked by reporters in Denton, Texas, whether the failed execution in Tennessee would lead him to seek changes to capital punishment, Trump called it “an interesting situation.” He said carrying out lethal injections “shouldn’t be very difficult.”
Trump’s approval sets in motion a series of procedural steps toward carrying out Hasan’s execution. But the convicted killer could still slam the brakes on the process. According to an article published in May in the magazine Army Lawyer, Hasan could put the process on hold — potentially for years — by filing a habeas corpus appeal in the civilian federal court system challenging the legality of his detention.
Hasan was convicted in a 2013 court-martial of 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted premeditated murder, and he was sentenced to death. He exhausted his regular appeals in 2025.
Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, walked into the Soldier Readiness Processing Center at Fort Hood, where soldiers were undergoing medical checkups before deploying. Witnesses testified that he shouted “Allahu akbar” — Arabic for “God is great!” — before he opened fire with a laser-sighted handgun.
When the gunfire stopped, 13 people were dead and more than 30 others were wounded.
According to the Associated Press, Hasan said he carried out the shooting to stop soldiers from going to Afghanistan and killing his fellow Muslims.
Hasan chose to represent himself at his 2013 court-martial and mounted little defense. He told jurors that the evidence would show he was the shooter, and he described himself as a soldier who had “switched sides.”
The Pentagon did not explain why Hasan would be executed by firing squad rather than by lethal injection, which is the method specified in the military’s current execution regulations. Officials also did not say whether those regulations would need to be changed to carry out the sentence.
ABC News reported in June that the Army adopted a plan in February for carrying out military executions at the federal government’s execution facility in Terre Haute, Indiana.
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